Buildroot Developers Meeting, 3-4 November 2012, Barcelona Spain

What is Buildroot ?

Buildroot is a set of Makefiles and patches that makes it easy to generate a complete embedded Linux system. Buildroot can generate any or all of a cross-compilation toolchain, a root filesystem, a kernel image and a bootloader image. Buildroot is useful mainly for people working with small or embedded systems, using various CPU architectures (x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.) : it automates the building process of your embedded system and eases the cross-compilation process.

Meeting in Barcelona

The Buildroot community is organizing a meeting on Saturday November 3rd and Sunday November 4th, for Buildroot developers and contributors. This meeting will be a mixture of discussion and hacking session around the Buildroot project. This meeting takes place right before the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, in order to make it easy for participants to attend both events.

Details of the discussion

1. Perl. The perl patch series (now at v11) looks ready to be integrated, but we have our doubts about cpanminus. The problems are: it has separate download infrastructure, which blocks some buildroot features (e.g. make source); it doesn't integrate with the legal-info. However, CPAN is pretty important if you really want to use perl. The decision was to accept cpanminus as well, but add some warnings that some things don't work.
1. Qemu. Adding this opens the door for more people to do stuff that buildroot wasn't meant for in the first place (i.e. embedded). However, even in embedded qemu could be relevant. Things like the compiler on the target are much worse for doing crazy things. Giving new packages a chance is OK; we have to be much more careful with things that have global impact (like including development files on target). Conclusion: it's OK to accept qemu.
1. Compiler on target. It leads to newbies using buildroot in an inappropriate way (i.e. compile on the target). Also it only works with the internal toolchain. And if we remove it, we can also remove "Development files on target", which simplifies some of the build infrastructure. Also, if you have a compiler on the target, then you can just as well use a distro. Conclusion: we remove it.
1. Documentation on target: if you need this, use a distro. So we remove it.

Luca Ceresoli, confirmed. Arriving on November 3rd at BCN airport 10:05 AM. Leaving on November 7th from BCN airport 19:15 PM. Staying at Hotel Fira Palace. Will arrive around 11:30 AM for the meeting.

Samuel Martin, confirmed. Arriving on November, 3rd at Barcelona-Franca Train Station 8:05 AM. Leaving on November 10th from Barcelona-Franca Train Station at 8:43 PM.

Simon Dawson, confirmed. Arriving on November 2nd in the evening. Leaving on November 8th early morning.

Registration

Please contact Thomas Petazzoni (thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com) if you would like to attend.

Attending the event is free, but registration is required.

Program

Saturday, 10 AM: beginning of the meeting. The first person to arrive can go directly to the front desk and ask for MARIBEL SOCIAS or anyone in the Reservations Department, and then ask for the meeting room booked for Thomas Petazzoni. Thomas Petazzoni will only arrive at 10:30-11 AM.

Saturday, 7 PM: end of the meeting

Saturday, 8:30 PM: dinner sponsored by Synopsys

Sunday, 10 AM: beginning of the meeting

Sunday, 7 PM: end of the meeting

Location

The event will take place at Hotel Grumps, in downtown Barcelona. See this map for the location of the hotel, and this map for walking directions between the Fira Palace hotel (location of the ELCE conference) and Hotel Grums.

The _AVAILABLE mechanism, and how to properly handle dependency on toolchain options (discuss the proposal made by Yann E. Morin). Proposed by User:ThomasPetazzoni.

Discuss (and, if approved, implement) the split between _LICENSE and _REDISTRIBUTE for legal-info. I think this won't take much more than 10 minutes chat + 10 minutes hack. Proposed by Luca Ceresoli.

Make it possible to use a git repository as source for toolchain. This doesn't work well today. Proposed by Mischa Jonker

Make it possible to do a 'target-clean', as a replacement of uninstall. Will this even work at all? Proposed by Arnout Vandecappelle

Does it make sense to port the toolchains to generic-package infrastructure? Asked by Arnout Vandecappelle

How to provide licensing info for packages that have more than one license. The main use cases are: a) different parts of the source code have different licenses, b) a file (or the whole project) is distributed under two or more licenses or c) a mix of the two. See the recent thoughts about this issue by Yann Morin: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2012-October/060475.html

Support for board stuff outside the buildroot tree. Proposed by Arnout Vandecappelle

Should we remove the ability to build a toolchain on the target? And also things like development files on target, documentation on target, etc. Proposed by User:ThomasPetazzoni.